Getting Old, Letting Go

I took all of my Nintendo paraphernalia to GameStop recently and sold the lot. I could almost certainly have gotten more money if I had sold all that cool stuff on line, but I am lazy, I don't want to bother with haggling with people, and I didn't want to be tempted to keep any of it. I became intrigued with The Legend of Zelda several years ago as a sort of exploration in religious history. Zelda has a canon, pseudopigrapha, lore and legend, saints and historians and hagiographers. I found it fascinating to be able to study such an intellectual system that was, being only thirty years old, completely accessible. And, being a hardware junky, I bought several Nintendo consoles and games besides Zelda. Video games are, as not only I am aware, an important part of recent art history.

But, I found myself rather Zelda-ed out. I have been exploring Tamriel lately, the local of the Elderscrolls, rather than Hyrule. I was tempted to keep the Zeldoid devices as a prompt for comparative religious history, but there is so much Zelda material online that it's not really necessary. So, now someone else can enjoy the beautiful hardware that I have so enjoyed. These were things that gave me joy, but which I did not use.

At my age, I can look back over a wide range of collections of beautiful things that I no longer have: telescopes (four); cars (I don't even remember how many); kayaks (16); books (probably around  20,000); pottery (tons--there was a time when often gave sit-down dinners for 30 or more people.) I have friends who are hoarders, who have bits and pieces of as many parts of their past as they can hold onto in closets and shelves and attics and storage units, or scattered around the yard, because those things might be useful again, or because they are connected to important memories. My tendency to buy whole collections of things when I have an interest in a new subject I suppose I copied from my father, who was an avid hobbyist, but with serial hobbies. My ability to let them go must be from my mother, who would haul out almost anything if it wasn't nailed down, and if it was she might call 911 for help prying it loose. Who knows what she did with my telescopes and microscopes that I left at home when I went off to college. (I don't think she had any idea of what I had spent for those wonderful instruments. If she had, I think she would just have thought me foolish, but it probably wouldn't have kept her from clearing them out.)

The GameStop guy asked me, when he told me how little he could offer for my New Nintendo 3DS XL, if I wanted to keep. It was the second one I have bought, I gave the first one away to a kid whom I thought to need it more than I, but then Zelda-nostalgia convinced me to buy another one for at least The Ocarina of Time. I told him no. If I kept it, I would re-buy Majora's Mask, and A Link Between Worlds, and then I would just feel guilty because I didn't play them.  Abstinence is easier than moderation.

What I realize more and more is that I have plenty of stuff, both to enjoy and to do, but I am running out of life. I can buy just about anything I want, except for a Diamond DA 50--and more time. So, letting go of things that I might feel I should use frees me to do things that I enjoy more, that provide more joy now.

There is always a temptation, it seems, to go back. One of my current obsessions is the life and work of Cy Twombly, a painter I found fascinating when I was in high school but who sort of felt off my horizon when I moved to Chicago with the glorious clutter of the artists at the Art Institute.  When Twombly was 66, he began to spend more and more time in his home town of Lexington, Virginia. He did, however, keep exploring new ways to paint.  He seemed to enjoy the comfort of his history in Lexington, but he did not let himself become tied to it.

I am older than Twombly was when he returned to Lexington, and I understand the attraction of the past.  If I had as much money as Twombly, I might go back to the old country and buy a little place so that I could take vacations in the past.  But I don't have enough money, as Twombly did, to keep a place in the past and another couple of places in the present.  However, in the eight years since Twombly died, the internet has expanded fast enough that I can visit, at least visually, the little house I almost bought the last time I revisited the old country.

The house belonged to a woman for whom I worked as a sort of yard- and handyman when I was in high school.  I know how beautiful its rear garden is, with the first French doors and loggia that I ever saw. It was for sale about twenty years ago, and I almost bought it.  But I didn't.  Now I can look at it and be happy that I don't have to keep up the yard.  I can look at it and be happy that I don't have to endure the heat of its summers.  I can look at it and let go of a life that has become as imaginary as Hyrule, as imaginary as the images in Google Street View.  My present life may not be magnificent, but it is enough to keep me surprised each day by all the riches that present themselves.  It is enough to keep me up past my bedtime trying to cram more in each day.  I am at a stage of life and the world is at a stage of history when shell shock is the  pretty much the common condition of us all (Cue Alvin Toffler).  And yet I try to cram more in each day until my heart stops beating. I understand the attraction of the old.  But I also know that the old ain't there any more. Let it go.

The True Meaning of Christmas

(Spoiler:  I would never tell, even if I knew it. I like mysteries.)

A few weeks ago I had lunch with three Buddhists.  (Four if one counts the woman who had been a Buddhist but who now had dementia so that she didn't much participate in the conversation, although I wonder if she didn't best exhibit the true Buddha nature.)  It was an interesting lunch in many ways.  They were each students and practitioners of different Buddhist traditions, so much of their talk was about those differences.  They were all pretty advanced in their practices.   I kinda led them along for a while, showing as much innocence as I can muster before admitting to having been a practicing Christian priest. So for a while we shared stories of how many divergent/converging paths there are in the two religions, and of how many of the daily practices could be similar.

The ultimate question of the lunch was directed at me.  (I had been the one asking most of the questions most of the time.):  Did I still 'believe in' Christianity?  Not being sure what each of them might mean by Christianity, I said I would answer that question in terms of whether I thought that the Symbols of the Nicene Creed were true.  And I said, of course I didn't.  I mean, what does it mean, 'light from light'?  And wouldn't things be things become terribly cluttered with 'the resurrection of the dead'?  And I said that, of course I do.  It is a beautifully consistent and elegant way to express the relationship between the parts of the world, the causes and effects, and only claims to be dogma, that is, the best we can do to express the inexpressible.  Then we traded phone numbers and said we would meet again and have coffee--or tea, in the case of those non-believers who only drink tea.

But of course, we haven't, and I had forgotten about that conversation until I tried to watch a video stream of the Advent Lessons and Carols from Washington National Cathedral.  I did pretty well until the Dean of the Cathedral replaced the traditional bidding prayer for Lessons and Carols, which is about our listening to stories and praying for the world, with asking God to tell us the 'true meaning of Christmas'.  At that point I gave up, because I knew what followed would not be the wonderfully complex, multivalent ambiguities of a collection of stories from many places and times combined with songs from many places and times that reflect on those stories but an attempt to make the meaning of Christmas that we should elect Elizabeth Warren president of the United States.  Now, I could live with someone's suggesting that electing such a person president might be congruent with the meaning of Christmas.  But I can't accept that it is possible to  to reduce Christmas to one meaning, to claim that there is true meaning of Christmas and that we err to expand the feast to include pagan practices like yule logs and trees from old non- or ore-Christians sources or non-, post-Christian urban practices like stealing the baby Jesus from the nativity scene in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, or lighting the front of Saks in New York. 

If we really do believe in 'One God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible,' then we are  stuck with a lot of things that we find difficult to accept as true, such as Santa Claus being at one time in every department store in the developed world and coming down chimneys in houses with steam heat.  But, hey, if you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand it.

So, I would suggest that when someone tells you 'the true meaning of Christmas', smile, because that would perhaps 'rejoice [the Christ Child's] heart', and then put that meaning in a bag of gifts to ponder.  Be careful when you smile, though.  Someone might think you are the Buddha on the road and kill you.  But even if that happens, you can still look for the resurrection of the dead.

The Joy of Failure

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or, what's a heaven for?

Last night, a friend and I watched Dolemite is My Name, a movie about making a movie, Dolemite.  Afterwards we stood outside and smoked a cigarette and my friend wondered where the planets that are in alignment with the moon were.  He's kinda woo-woo and into astrology.  I pointed to the ground to the southwest and said they were set.  'How could I know that?' he asked, and took out his phone to check with an app.  I said that the moon is new, and therefore close to the sun, which had set about five hours earlier, and since it's winter it would be towards the south and not just the west.  We talked whether Venus was on this side of the sun or the far side.  (It's the far side, and I used an app for that.)  He wondered how I could know that.  I recounted the tale of my adventures as an amateur astronomer when I was in high school, of the telescopes I built and used, back in the dark ages when there were no apps for anything.  He was impressed and said that I could have been something, a reference to the theme of the movie about achievement being possible for those who really work for achievements.  I said that I had never wanted to be something, but to know something,

That statement is not completely true.  Like Dante , 'In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.'  For an unfortunately long number of years after high school I tried to be a average American husband/citizen.  Wife.  Kids. Dogs. Cars.  As Zorba would say, 'the whole catastrophe.'  Oddly, perhaps, one of the most satisfying things of that period of my life was a Jeep Wagoneer.  In McLuhan's terms, this was an exceedingly powerful extension of myself, a strong carapace.  But, alas, it was a dominatrix, costing more than I could really afford and being quite unreliable.

But, in my forty-first year, I returned to the path of an aimless wanderer seeking data.  I again made discovering facts and ideas the main occupation of my life rather than seeking 'success."

Of course, I had accumulated a lot of facts and ideas even while I was in servitude to the American dream.  There's data everywhere.  One odd piece of anecdotal data is that when my wife and I broke up, several people expressed their dismay because they thought that we were the happiest couple they knew.  I'm not sure if that meant that we were very good actors or that a lot of other people were miserable in their journeys.

It would take a few more years before I stopped feeling vaguely guilty about not being some thing and comfortable with wanting to understand things.  I supported my habits with a number of quite assorted jobs because that let me know a lot of assorted people whom I would never have met if I had stayed glued to the oculus of a telescope.  (Although now astronomers mostly look at screens much like the one I'm using to look at my 'writing' now.)

I didn't really figure out what I keep trying to do until about six years ago when I had dinner in Fayetteville with a friend from high school whom I had hardly seen since graduation.  He is very successful in his craft, has plenty of work which he enjoys, and has also made several millions of dollars along the way.  He mentioned another of our class mates whom I had found somewhat loathsome, who was now the second richest man in Arkansas.  I felt rather sorry for him.  He still has wretched taste in cigars, and he was only the second richest man.  My dinner friend , who recognized that I had not made any millions but was too polite to mention it even though he insisted on paying the bill, saying he could put it on his expense account, had a question for me.  What did I want my legacy to be.  That has proved to be a very helpful question.  I told him that I didn't particularly want to have a legacy, that in the long view of history most of what we consider are great events and great people are just blips.

But, I have thought about that question a lot, because I realize that I am on a quest that cannot be successful:  I want to understand how things work.  (At the time my friend and I had dinner, I had gone to the University of Arkansas thinking I would learn about quantum physics. Ha. Cue Dick Feynman.) Who knows:  someday human beings may understand how things work, but I certainly don't expect to live that long.  But in the meantime, I am enjoying watching the process.

I am not, however, often impressed by men who leave big legacies.  The cell phone almost certainly have been developed even if Tony Nadell had not nudged Steve Jobs to push Apple in that direction.  The theory of relativity was just waiting for someone like Albert Einstein to connect the dots left by many others whose names and equations are not famous.  And slavery in the United States would almost certainly have ended without Abraham Lincoln allowing the war that killed 620,00 people, a few of whom are buried under the snow on a hill overlooking Fayetteville in the Confederate cemetery.  (There are many more folks buried in the US cemetery, but it isn't nearly so picturesque and doesn't encourage reverie and reflection.)

Now another winter is beginning.  It is certainly far past the middle of the journey of our life.  And by the standards of becoming famous like Dolemite or making astronomical discoveries like Virginia Trimble, someone else who looked into the skies as a kid, I suppose I am a failure.

But, I am insofar as I can figure it out, living my own life.  I don't want to be rich; I have enough money even though perhaps if I were to do my life again I would have realized that I might live a long time and gather up enough gold to live in New York where I could go to the MoMA and the Guggenheim.   But even if I dd, most of my time would be spent the same way it is now in the other corner of the country.  I don't care about being famous. I just want to follow the devices and desires of my own heart, realizing that that will as often as not lead to disappointment and failure as to joy.  But why settle for being the second richest man in Babylon when I can reach for the heavens.

But I do think that I might now wish to have a legacy.  It would be to encourage any kid I meet, whatever age, to live his or her own life and avoid distractions.  Even if that kid is someone I rather loathe and who wants to be the richest man in Babylon.  It's his own life, too.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall.

My own complicated relationship with Facebook is very much public knowledge.  I was struck again by how weird a thing such a platform is when I opened 'my news feed' to read posts by friends which seemed to me, a boy from the South who was taught that the only proper way to play one's cards is as close to one's chest as possible, to be so personal that I found it embarrassing to read them.  (But of course I did.)

In my own journal I wrote that such posts  seem  more properly to be journal entries than news, and that although perhaps one should always tell nothing but the truth, it is probably neither necessary nor helpful always to tell the whole truth.  Besides, how one sees oneself is seldom truthful.

Also in my news feed was a post saying that Brian Acton, founder of WhatsApp, says to delete Facebook: 'If you want to have ads thrust in your face, go to town.'

When I have wanted to quit Facebook, it has never been about the ads.  The ads are almost always the best content on the platform. Ads are probably, as McLuhan claimed, the only real American art form.  I much prefer them to the angst and anger that so often appears in friends' posts.

More important than their artfulness, I would suggest, is that the adverts are a really useful kind of data about me.  In the great debate about data, I am pretty near the 'no data is private' camp.  I mean, one might like to think that one's Social Security Number is private, but the US government long ago violated the terms of use with which it was introduced, and without sending anyone an email explaining the changes. 

Facebook, Google, Amazon, and I, are all in the business of trading data.  And so are you, dear reader.  Do I need to explain this statement?  I think that I won't for now, but instead present this blog's central thesis:  targeted advertisements are a mirror of one's desires, desires one sometimes even hides from oneself.  They are data that can provide clearer understanding.  But, as is so often true, we want to kill the messenger.  In the famous case of Target sending adverts for items needed by pregnant women, it was Target who was targeted as the meanie.  But the girl who received the adverts was pregnant.

You may have watched, as I did, the Netflix movie The Great Hack, which is billed as some sort of expose of Cambridge Analytica's use of data.  What did Cambridge Analytica really do that was so heinous?  They recognized the real desires of a nation which was intent on hiding those desires from themselves.  CNN had told us that we were kind and gentle, which got more of us to watch, so they could charge more for their adverts.

Ah yes, but advertising is turning us into a nation of consumers, right?  I was amused by the coincidence of two posts on one friend's news feed. 'We are no longer bound together by religion, but by vacuous consumption addictions' followed close on the heels of a quote my friend attributed to Upton Sinclair about the difficulty of a man's understanding something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.  My friend is a priest.  So far as I know, the number of five star reviews of iPhones by verified purchasers is rather higher than the number of any reviews of heaven by verified purchasers.

Of course we are consumers.  A great accomplishment of the modern industrial society is that not only do we have enough food to consume (remember, those who don't consume starve) but that we have many other things to consume as well.  Great books, trashy art, skinny jeans, ear buds, dildos, soy milk, hymnals, iPhones, the list could go on for a very long time.


So, dear reader, the next time you have an ad thrust in your face, ask not what the ad is saying about Facebook, but what the ad is saying about you.  (Insert here your preferred quote about the value of truth.)

The Election Cults

The feardoms that are US presidential politics are upon us again.  It's a time when I stop following a lot of my Facebook friends because their posts are often embarrassingly uninformed and fearful.  I follow one Trumpeteer and one Berning Man just to remind me what it's like out there, but mostly I try to ignore as much hyperbole as possible.

I have been reminded once again of the depths of the fear that can be used to control us by watching what may be one of my favourite seasons of American Horror Story, Cult.  (My other favourite is Roanoke .)  I find it particularly intriguing that I am getting around to it as the nation descends into impeachment frenzy and anti-frenzy.  I confess that although it seems that Mr. Trump certainly did at least try to abuse the power of the office in Ukraine,  and attempted to violate the Constitution, Mr. Biden did as well.  There's no surprise there.  Almost none of the recent presidential candidates seem to consider the Constitution as more than a hindrance to their desire for imperial power.

Actually, the far more worrying aspect of the Trump presidency to me has been his nationalism, which like most of his 'policies' has been very poorly thought out.  He has done great damage to American companies who would benefit from the growing Chinese market.  Is China a less-than-perfect society?  Of course.  But it has been the inroads of international market capitalism which have made the most improvements in the conditions of the Chinese people.  Nixon may have been a crook, but he was at least a smart crook. So, while Trump tries to get the United States to build a wall, China is building Belts and Roads.

So, I want to make a full disclosure of what I would want in a candidate, and who is the constituency that I think is most important for US policy. 

I don't give diddly squat about national health care.  The United States are not very united, and with the great disparity in thought and feelings in the country, that seems just another great divider, and one which  would only add to the economic fragility of a country that doesn't even have the leadership to make a budget.  You like the health care of Sweden?  Fine.  But remember that Sweden's population falls between that of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, each of which have the resources for such care.  You worried about immigrants taking American's jobs.  Fine, but remember that the jobs taken by immigrants are almost always those progressives keep trying to legislate out of existence by raising wages, and which are being automated/roboted out of existence by technical progress.  The real crisis in jobs is not who occupies them but that the jobs themselves are changing far more rapidly than we are willing to acknowledge or know how to prepare for.

The person I care most about in the US elections is that scrawny street kid in the photo.  He is the one for whom I want there to be better opportunities, better education, better health care.  And the data, the facts of world history, make it very clear that global trade, multi-national capitalism, free markets, the very things that most of the US presidential candidates make the enemies and rail against, are the forces that really improve the situation for that kid.  And they are the forces that fuel real liberation of women, and of men, too.   I would gladly trade my medicare and border protection for that kid's future.

Logos and Shitposting: Facebook and the Empire

Or, who is sovereign in my life?

When I was an idealistic college sophomore, I was the editor of a tiny journal published with the sponsorship of the  philosophy department at Memphis State University,  Being all idealistic and hopeful that one could know the truth and that the truth would set one free, and that the truth could be expressed and known in words, we called our little rag Logos.

Our policy was a noble one:  we intended to provide a platform where anyone could publish their ideas on any subject.  Our first issue was about the size of a poster for lost cats.  But the second issue included the beginning of our  longest series, a commentary on Wittgenstein's Brown Notebook that was wonderfully obtuse and long.  Each time a new issue came out, one of us young colosssi from the Logos staff would stand outside the student center around lunchtime and distribute these pearls of freedom of thought to the hungry students yearning to breathe free. The MSU students wer almost always more interested in the macaroni or chicken-friend steak, so we never needed a very large print run.

About the fourth issue of our Logos, however, the reaction of the masses changed.  After a few copies had been taken,  there were some folk who wanted more. who wanted multiple copies., who wanted all the copies.  That was the issue to which a very slightly-built young man who called himself Vernon Pow-El Cox had submitted a little letter to Logos criticizing the growing war in a place few of the kids in the lunch room could find on a globe, but where many of them would find their death, Vietnam.  Vernon's uncle had been killed there already, and he didn't like it.  Apparently there were folk who didn't like that he could say that he didn't like it, because they were trying to get all the copies of Logos not to read but to burn.

In the next issue, Vernon had another letter,  and he wanted to distribute it himself.  Vernon's 110 pound ferocity was no match for the members of the Memphis State Football team who grabbed all the copies of our journal and tossed him aside. So, we reprinted that issue.  This time David Dybek and I decided to distribute it.  We were the studliest members of the Logos staff, each weighing in at around 137 pounds, and we were both long-distance runners, an asset which would prove  important for our journalistic futures.  We, too, were surrounded by members of the football team, who punched us to the cheers of the crowd around.  The campus police intervened, because we were in their jurisdiction and they should have the first kicks and jabs at us trouble makers.  The university president quickly summoned the Tennessee State Police--if this hadn't happened to me, I don't think I would have believed that it could happen--who kicked us, literally, off-campus where we were given a short period of protection, now by the stick-wielding Memphis Police. from the now large crowd  gathered to watch free speech and those who protested it.  Vernon Pow-El Cox climbed on top of a car and talked about his now-two uncles who were early fatalities of the Vietnam War, although I doubt anyone much heard him.  Then we were told to run, and the crowd was let loose. Vernon actually hid under a car. (His later fate needs a post of its own.) David and I ran probably our best times to the red door of the Newman Foundation and took refuge in the Church. (photo above)  The crowd got tired or hungry and dispersed.  David and I walked unnoticed back to our classes, although Memphis State refused to readmit me for my junior year, even though I was a National Merit Scholar and had about a 3.8 average.  (I would probably have had a 4.0, but I didn't do well in mandatory ROTC).  The University dealt with the immediate problem of free speech by installing racks for student publications, making it easy for anyone to destroy them all or to ignore them as they wished, without beating up the paper boys.

I was reminded of the Logos Incident as US presidential hopefuls attack Facebook.  I actually left Facebook for a short time, because my friends were so repetitious and thoughtless in their posts.  Although sually less obtuse than commentary on Wittgenstein, cat photos and sunsest soon have a sameness.  I didn't think that Facebook was evil, just that it was boring, and it was a place where my friends could post embarrassingly under-thought responses to 'issues' that I felt a friendly duty to consider.

But I am returning to Facebook because it is a sort of successor in spirit to Logos.  Obviously it is much larger and has much more power.  Because of its success, Facebook has become unlike anything previous to it. It's in an odd new category beyond being a community bulletin board but not really a newspaper, either.  It's easy to hate on Mark Zuckerberg and notice his blunders.  I wish he had gone to the mat sooner and fought to be a bulletin board.  Yet Facebook remains an entity from which one can opt out, and which one can choose to ignore entirely.

Elizabeth Warren does not have a plan to let me opt out of her Brave New World.  She wants sovereignty with all its perks, and she wants it bigly.  Sovereignty is a fascinating concept.  It could be theoretical if it were not for the easy exertion of force.  It was very hard for Vernon Pow-El Cox to exercise the individual sovereignty he felt he inherited as an idea of the Enlightenment when he was cast aside by football line men with the force they had inherited from the Neanderthals..  By the time of the Logos incident the sovereignty of the Church had long been cast aside by the sovereignty (how many divisions of troops does the Pope command?) of the state, but it had been granted some at least symbolic jurisdiction because it still contained voters.

I think we are seeing the emergence of new sovereignties, post-state entities which will largely replace the nation states.  Bernie Sanders' real foe in controlling the health care of the United States isn't the republicans but Amazon Prime Care.  What I find hopeful in this development is that the new sovereigns could remain voluntary.  I was baptized into the Church.  I was born into the State.  Both claim pretty much absolute power.  I can still opt in and out of Facebook.

So, I am not swearing fealty to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.  But I am choosing the voluntary participation in the Facebook community as a glimpse into a world which might exist after the collapse of the compulsory nation-state.  I am also looking into Gab, which at this time seems closer to the goals of my sophomore idealistic  Logos.

Who are all these people?

I awoke this morning to the gentle sound of rain on the hull of Deck 15 and the gentle vibration of my Android smart watch reminding me that it was a friend's birthday.  I looked at the name of my 'friend' and thought, 'who the fuck is this person?'  I looked at his profile.  Ah.  He's someone I met once on a trip to a bit of my past, or someone who had seen my comment on a friends Facebook post and had sent me a friend request, or I had done the same to him, and we had 'liked' each other's posts for a few days and  then had pretty much forgotten about each other.  So, I was glad to be reminded of him, and I sent him a birthday greeting. He's one of the 2.7 billion people on Facebook.  That's about half the world's population.

Like many people, I am often disgusted by Facebook.  It shows me that people are often mean and ignorant.  It claims to be a platform for free speech but it censors folks whose outlooks on the world are different from what is fashionable in Menlo Park.  But those factors that make me disgusted with Facebook are probably its greatest strength.  I already know that folks like their grandkids and cats and think they're good cooks.  (Yup.  I know that's an ambiguous pronoun, because some folks think they are themselves  good cooks, some people like their grandkids' cooking, and some folks show their cats as chefs.)  What is easy to forget is that there is a huge variety of outlooks among the 2.7 billion people on Facebook, and that's just half of us.  Censoring those who disagree with Menlo Park or with me is not going to be helpful if we are to live more peacefully.  Understanding them, and remembering that even the ones who don't smoke the same cigarettes as me still love their grandchildren and cats might.

So, here's to the mean ones, the stupid ones, the ones who aren't so enlightened as I and my friends who agree with me 98% of the time.  May we be reminded whether we like it or not that we are all planet mates, and may we all be patient with one another until we all become enlightened and use the Android operating system.

He Looked so Handsome in his Uniform

I recently watched a video about Marsden Hartley, a painter who 'fit in' with his contemporaries in life style or art style rather rarely.  Many of his paintings use very dark palettes.  A major exception was his series sometimes called his German Paintings, or his Uniform Paintings. They were painted as Europe prepared for the War to End Wars.  Looking back on that war, we sometimes think about how it might have been avoided.  But for many of the folk of the early twentieth century, the search was for how it might begin.  It's odd that people so easily glorify war.  It's true that what we now call World War I was much more brutal, much more destructive of a whole generation, than any war that had come before it, but previous wars had not been kind and gentle.  (Perhaps had the America Civil War been televised in Germany and England and France, they might not have been so eager to fight.)

Why would so many young men be eager to join a war, one in which they could expect as high chance of being wounded or killed?  Hartley commented on the attraction of the drums.  Folk like to march to the beat of the drummer.  But he painted the uniforms.  At the beginning of the war, the uniforms of the great armies of Europe were colourful and attractive, especially as contrasted to the drab costumes of workers.  As the war wore on, the uniforms became more drab. The French resisted changing the design of their uniforms to something more camouflaged from the bright blue with which they began the war because such a change was considered a lack of valour.  Five years later, as many as 19 million valourous soldiers of all the nations shared the same uniform.

Hartley's Uniform Paintings prompted me to think about the allure of uniformity more generally, even though military uniforms are probably the most common use of the term.  I had a friend who was an ardent pacifist, who never missed an anti-war rally, but who was married to a Marine Captain.  She married him, she said, because 'he looked so handsome in his uniform."

Just as the (drums and) uniforms of the early twentieth century helped generate support for the Great War, the uniforms of the Nazis in Germany were an important tool in generating support for the Furhrer's struggle, from simple brown shirts to Hugo Boss's uniforms for the SS.

If wars were decided on style points (and if the Nazis had not driven the Jewish intellectuals out of the country), World War II might have ended very differently. 

But there are many forms of uniformity--I like that oxymoronic phrase, because if captures what often we deny in our claims to be 'individuals'.  I suspect that mine is the last generation for whom David Riesman's  The Lonely Crowd has any relevance.  I remember reading it and identifying strongly as an 'inner-directed' person.  I tried to register as a Conscientious Objector based on personal beliefs.  My claim was denied, but my draft board said they would grant that status if I would just choose an other-directed approach as a Methodist. 

We live in a time when the 'loner', the 'outsider' is automatically suspect. This is, in the long expanse of human history, almost certainly the normal situation.  Not even Henry David Thoreau was appreciated by many of his contemporaries, despite his veneration by literature teachers who themselves are a bit of outsiders. 

When I was applying for Conscientious Objector status, the most popular brand of nonconformity, of anti-uniformity, was the hippie movement, a brand that was carefully marketed by folks like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, although of course we hippie sorts considered ourselves superior to straight society that was influenced by Madison Avenue.  It's worth quoting Alvin Toffler on the hippie ad campaign:

'The successful "sale" of the hippie life style model to young people all over the techno-societies, is one of the classic merchandising stories of our time.

'Not all subcults are so aggressive and talented at flackery, yet their cumulative power in the society is enormous.  This power stems from our almost universal desperation to "belong."  The primitive tribesman feels a strong attachment to his tribe.  He knows that he "belongs" to it, and may even have difficulty imagining himself apart from it.  The techno-societies are so large, however, and their complexities so far beyond the comprehension of any individual, that it is only by plugging in to one or more of their subcults, that we maintain some sense of identity and contact with the whole.' (1970, p. 310)

The hippies are still alive, although whether their state is one of wellness I might doubt, and still making money.  They still hold rallies, even if they are not perhaps so stylishly orchestrated as those of Albert Speer.

Until recently, at least, an 'until' which I think is very important, few folks in techno-societies wanted to be considered sheeple, a desire which was a powerful marketing tool, one that Apple used to become the most valuable brand in the world.

Anyone knew that you were one of the crazy ones if you belonged to the Cult of Mac, right?

And it didn't hurt that if one belonged to the subcult of Apple, one found fellow cultists rallying at all the best coffee shops and universities, where everyone could think differently together in a safe space.

Now,I of course cling to the illusion that I am a individual, a visitor from the Gutenberg Galaxy.  Indeed when recently I attended design classes at the University of Arkansas, surrounded by kids with MacBooks and iPhones,  I used a Samsung Galaxy Note tablet for my work.  and sported my Galaxy phone without a case while the cool kids had to protect the premium materials of Jony Ive's latest masterpiece with a case, which to me seemed to moot the beauty of the design.

Funny, ain't it, how we define ourselves.  And as an obsessive compulsive bloke, I occasionally feel pulled to Cult of Apple because of the uniformity of the design language.  I am, it seems, firmly and happily in the cult of design nerds.

But, the times, they are a-changin', as the Nobel Prize wining bard sang in 1964, when I was graduating from high school, when I expressed my rebelliousness by refusing to go to pep rallies and by skipping the lunch room to sit under a tree and read.  And the times are a-changin' faster than ever. 

Apple cultists tend for the most part to be clean, well-groomed, gentle folks who don't want to force me to buy a MacBook by law.  They don't want to deny me a job because I wear an LG Style instead of an Apple Watch, although I haven't gone to a job interview for a while.  That quirk of mine might be a bigger handicap than I recognize, and I do sometimes take my iPad to the coffee shop just to show the sheeple that I am not too poor for premium design.

But there are a lot of cults who are not so gentle.  Identity politics seems to have taken over the US electoral process, making the tribal choices we have made seem to be moral imperatives that need to be forced on everyone else.  I find it one of the many ironies of contemporary politics that the groups who claim to be anti-imperialist are the most aggressively imperialist of all. 

I wish I knew some way to encourage us folk to consider our neo-tribalism as what it almost always is, a way we seek comfort in a world over over-whelming change, rather than trying to understand that change.  No matter what our world view, there are phenomena that just don't fit, that are at war with each other.  Ah, but a uniform world view would be so handsome.  Even I recognize how premium is the material, how uniform the design language, of the new iPhone and Pad Pro.

The Butterfly Effect

On 28 June, 1969, the love of my life was a green Volvo 144. I had a beautiful and smart wife, but she was a beard. I consciously thought of the Volvo, following Marshall McLuhan, as my Mechanical Bride. I mean, what was more macho than having a car and being one's own mechanic? Surely having greasy fingernails meant that I was straight, right? (Perhaps I should have gone for a muscle car, but, whatever.) I was enrolled in a physics class at Memphis State University which somehow I had never quite gotten around to taking in order to finish my BA in history from Roosevelt University. Then, I was going to teach in an inner city Memphis public school as an alternative to going to Vietnam.  i had tried for a conscientious objector's status, but my draft board wouldn't allow it unless I claimed a religion. I could have played the Methodist card--my beautiful and smart wife and i had been married in a Methodist ceremony, and the chairman of the draft board, also a Methodist, suggested it. But I refused. The chairman of the draft board was also the mother of my brother's fiance, and she suggested the inner-city teaching gig. Killing kids slowly with day imprisonment rather than dropping napalm on them. It seemed better.

If I read or watched the news then, it was probably about what was going on in Vietnam. Beautiful and smart wife and I had a television then. I remember another young man who was almost my first lover--we had been roommates, and we slept together and cuddled and wrestled and washed each others' backs but never did anything genital came over to watch the Moon landing in July. But I didn't see any news that June on either the television or the newspaper about queers fighting back against a routine police raid of a bar in New York, 2,334 miles away, even though that was much closer than the 238,900 miles that separated me from the Moon.

Indeed it would be nearly twenty years later before the ripples of the 'riots' at the Stonewall Inn would become strong enough to rock my boat and give me the courage to 'come out'. By that time my beard included two children, two golden retrievers, a mini van and a station wagon, and a large Tudor style house.

I have been thinking about my ignorance of the Stonewall Inn in 1969 as I have looked at the 'news' today.  We only went to the Moon for about three years. and the repercussions of those trips have probably been more about how we see the Earth than in furthering space travel. The repercussions of the Stonewall Riots have been, in my life and in the lives of many of my friends, transformational. The idea that I would not need to hide my self behind a wife and greasy fingernails has led to far more than genital sex with some very beautiful men, as enjoyable as that has been. Once I realized how seldom things are as they have been presented, a whole new possibility of exploration has opened.

You may have noticed that I used the term 'queer' for the people who fought back at Stonewall, rather than the more politically correct LGBT+ that most of the stories I have read on this anniversary of the riots have used. That is because I think most of us are in some way queer, that most of us have some traits, traits that are often very valuable gifts, even if we happen to be cisgendered straight folk.  So, I say, come out come out whoever you are. You never know when you might be the butterfly who will open a whole new world for some kid who grew up in a backwards small town in mid nowhere, as I did.

Big Media, Data Leaks, and Government Spying in the Good Old Days

By late 1966, there were 385,000 American soldiers on the ground in Vietnam, with another 60,000 sailors stationed offshore. More than 6,000 Americans had been killed that year, and another 30,000 wounded. I was a naive sophomore at Memphis State University. I was there rather than at one of the many 'better' schools which had offered me scholarships because I kinda felt I wasn't really ready for prime time, and Memphis State wasn't quite prime time. The summer before I had been nominated by one of my professors to attend a big National Student Association summer seminar, first in Louisville with the other southern kids, then in Madison, where I was assigned the task of writing a paper about the influence of automation and computers on the job opportunities of minorities. I and the rest of the kids who were told we were there because of our brilliance, and we got to meet some of the rock stars of left-leaning political and artsy=fartsy sorts: Saul Alinski, Davis Campbell, and Julian Bond among others. (I had a serious crush on Bond.) Hubert Humphrey gave us a rousing address at the end of the event in Madison.  Later I would learn that I had been chosen because I had subscribed to Ramparts Magazine, and that rather than being funded by the Field Foundation, as had been claimed, the whole shindig was an agent provocateur operation run by the CIA.

But in the fall of 1966, I wondered why my luggage had been searched on the train from Louisville to Madison, but didn't expect it had been done by my government. I was still romantic and clueless. I still thought that Kennedy had been a 'good' president, and that congressmen thought about the decisions they made with some care and wisdom. (Having Bill Fulbright as my Senator probably skewed my perception. I considered E. C. Gathings to be bad guy in a regular sort of way, but I never wondered what it was he 'Took', and the farmers liked him, it seemed, and my grandmother liked his wife. (I don't know if it was the wife who posed naked for magazines on bear skin rugs.)  So, when there began to be protests against the war in Vietnam, and the Commercial Appeal published an editorial boasting how much wiser Memphians were than the citizens of Cleveland, I did what any romantic young clueless kid who had been told he was brilliant would do: I wrote a letter to the editor.

In my letter to the editor the Memphis Commercial Appeal--'A Beacon of Light to Serve the Mid-South'--I did not criticize the Vietnam War. I suggested rather than perhaps Memphians might not  be wise to ignore it, that it was likely to become a really big deal, and that perhaps they should do a bit of research about it--not so easy then, more than thirty years before Google--and that, most importantly, they might consider writing to their congressmen to see what they thought about the growing US involvement in Vietnam. I signed it with my Memphis State address.

Wowsers! The Commercial Appeal published my letter in the Sunday edition. I had achieved the big time. The glitch was that they published it with my parents' address. My parents started getting angry phone calls. The idea that one should write to one's congressman about something more trivial than the farm allotments and subsidies!

I decided to become a big time activist, since I was already getting the flack. I organized a 'write-in march'. I put posters up around town suggesting that people might write to their congressmen about the US involvement in Vietnam, and that we might gather at Union and East Parkway and walk to the downtown post office to mail our letters. I even wrote a press release, which I duly took to the local TV stations. Two of them just had in-boxes, but the Scripts-Howard station--the Beacon of Light guys--had a receptionist who took my paper and asked me what it was. I said it was a news release. I was told that nothing was news unless they decided it was news.  A few days later about twenty stalwart US citizens gathered to walk to the post office. Many more people, it seemed, were interested in furtively photographing us, and occasionally throwing rotten eggs at us. I know, a cliche, but true.

We mailed our letters. I and a few friends had lunch at Britlings--I always got the cod and the vanilla pudding, and went home for the next day in the life. On the next day in the life, two men in cheap hats parked their brown Chevrolet Biscayne with small hubcaps outside my apartment and just about never left. My telephone began to make strange noises.  The Commercial Appeal published another editorial about the Vietnam War, calling us rebels who had written letters to congress a 'small group of nobodies'. Although my room mate and I had never been late for our rent, we were told that our lease could not be renewed. Memphis State wrote me to say that they could not re-admit me the following year, even though I was a National Merit Scholar with a gradepoint of about 3.8, but they would find my transcript if I wanted to transfer.

There are a lot of other embellishments I could add to this story, including how Frank Zappa's Susie Creamcheese was the daughter of the Memphis police chief, who bragged to her that he has put one of her friends under the jail, which was how we found out what had happened to him and therefore could get him out, but this little amusement is already longer than the 15 seconds one is allotted in the 21st. century. But I was reminded of it when I was appalled by yesterday's photograph of Mark Zuckerberg and Emmanuel Macron sucking (zucking?) up to each other yesterday. They wore better suits than the guys in the cheap Chevrolet, but they jogged my memories of the good old days when the data leaks and spying and abuse were less well known.

I am, I suppose, still romantic and naive. I expect better of us. But we ain't changed much. What has changed is that the truth is not only out there, but not so hard to find if we are willing to look for it. Jesus is reported to have said, 'know the truth, and the truth shall make you free'.  But we seem to value border walls or 'free health care' over freedom.

We Are all Collaborators

I read tthe story that accompanied the photo, about Zuckerberg's turning over to the French goverment  information about folks who  post 'hate speech' on Facebook, and I was ready to ditch Facebook. Thern I began to think about what other actions I might take that would be commensure with that one.  Itseemed that I had two choices. I could become a hermit in a cave somewhere, with as little econnection as possible with the sinful world, spending my days confessing my sins and singing psalms, or watching birds and sunrises. Or, I could engage as much as possible with the world and try to understand it and its inhabitants.

At different times in my life, I have pretty much made both choices. The advantage of the hermetic option is its simplicity, it's completeness. Hermeticism  is pretty much a kind of monadism, complete unto itself. It aspires to be a pearl, a pure gem. Monks of course like to claim that their austerities and prayers benefit the whole world in some ways and there are enough people convinced of that to keep them in contributions or to buy their over-priced but holy fruit cakes and liquors. But I have noticed that taxes are never collected in thoughts and prayers.

The advantage of engagement is that it is dynamic. There is something new evry minute,  It is a fabric of many colours, not a pearl. There are always new materials to consider, new threads that may make the frabric stronger or that may make it tear. The difficulty in choosing materials is that very few of them have all the properties one might desire. One thread might be very strong but rather ugly. One might be beautiful but weak. It's hard to know what threads to include.

Of course there monastic communities that try to incorporate a variety of gifts into their community, but they get to choose their members. The body politic is more difficult. There are almost always some members, some threads in the political fabric, whom other members would rather exclude. A society that starts pure, like the early settlers of New England, the Puritans, have children who don't seem quite so pure as might be expected. A half-way covenant is needed. Or there are some groups whom a majority of a democracy deem completely unacceptable. A concentration camp is needed.

Few human inventions are more fragile than political power, so the powerful are fearful. They collaborate with one another to try to preserve the unpreservable. And those of us who would hold ourselves unstained from the world like to think we can avoid collaboration..  So, I look at the photograph of Zuckerberg and Macron and think that I will leave Facebook. Ha. Who am I in the parable of the wheat and the tares?  I think that I had beter remain engaged lest I find myself thrown into the furnace.

To Market, to Market

The moment that finally pushed me off my lazy butt to write this was Donald's Trump escalation of his trade war with China.  There are so many short-sighted notions floating around in American politics these days that I have been thinking about it for a while, even if I don't expect my sharing a viewpoint will cure the human urge for ideologies. Be warned: this little essay is a celebration of market capitalism, of freedom, of laissez faire, of open borders and of the open minds that come with them. It is an assertion that human progress, i.e., greater wealth and health and freedom for folks, has been the result of trade and economic growth and not of governmental programs. Do not expect to find here an embrace of the Green New Deal as a solution for global warming, especially since I am convinced that FDR's New Deal prolonged the great depression.

If you have not been totally triggered by my spoilers to stop reading, I want to consider the recent history of China as an example of the liberating effects of the market, and to consider how Donald Trump's trade war on China is in fact a war on the Chinese people and  support for the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese Communist Party is an interesting development, being much more Chinese, I would suggest, than communist.  The long political history of China is a series of totalitarian despotic regimes being replaced by other totalitarian despotic regimes. With regime change, property was usually redistributed to the followers of the new leaders. Mongol, Ming, or Mao, the pattern was the same. When Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China in 1949, the ideological justification for state despotism may have been new, but he became as much a Son of Heaven as any Sung emperor. The property of the opponents of the new regime were claimed in the name of the people, but the Mercedes 600's were owned by Mao and his party officials. When the golden age of Communism did not seem to have arrived, the blame was not taken by the party with their series of plans and purges. Rather there needed to be a Cultural Revolution to root out all remnants of traditional or capitalist ideas in China. There was a ten year reign of terror which continued even after the Revolution was officially over.

In 1976, Chairman Mao died. In 1978, at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee--why do revolutionaries always have such grandiose names for their little gangs?--Deng Xiaoping called for something which might well be followed by all politicians: to seek truth from facts and abandon ideological dogma. In the midst of the failure of Chinese Communism as envisioned in Mao's Little Red Book came the visit of Richard Nixon, making a Chinese role in the world market a real possibilities. I was living in Chicago when the main import from China--Taiwan, officially--was fire crackers. Soon one could buy bamboo steamers. Not very long after that in the measure of Chinese history one could buy iPhones.

With the coming of a market economy to China, there have finally been real advances in the standard of living for ordinary Chinese citizens. Intellectuals are no longer sent to slave gangs.  Girl babies are no longer abandoned. Please understand, I am not claiming that China is some kind of Adam Smithian Utopia. The Communist Party is still in charge, and its leader, Xi Jinping,is still by most standards a despot, even if he does often seem more enlightened than the US president who wishes to be a despot, Huawei may be owned by its employees' labor union, but it certainly operates within strict government limits. But, and this is I think the most important 'but', operation in the world market is the most important factor allowing China to become less despotic. Indeed, compared to most political parties, The Chinese Communists have been amazingly self-critical and self-correcting since the death of Mao, (Perhaps a bit of traditional Confucianism continues despite the Cultural Revolution.)

Donald Trump's trade policies, a policy of tariffs and wars, unfortunately will almost certainly push China back to a more isolated position, but also into a more aggressive position. The One Belt, Road Program will become more important than ever.  Trump's regressive Fortress America does little to encourage anyone choosing to trade with the United States.

Indeed, not only is Trump's trade war a war on the Chinese people, pushing them back into the arms of the Party, it is a war on the American people, increasing their cost of living and narrowing their choices. Unfortunately, the democrats seem to have no vision of the benefits of free trade, either.  I don't think any of them support my right to spend my money on whatever I can afford wherever it was made, which is what I would suggest is the essence of globilization. We are far too often motivated by fear and envy. We put up signs saying 'Buy Local' on stores that depend on a world-wide market system for their operation. We think that if someone else is doing well, it must be because he has cheated me, even though by any reasonable standard I am living like a king.

I remain an optimist, because of truth from facts not from ideology. Over the long course of human history, our technological advances and larger and larger communities have made possible better standards of living for more and more of us. But I think it is foolish to fight against advantages, and trade with China is a great advantage to the US and to China. Of course China tries to spin it in their interest. But if you own Apple stock or own a modern television, it should be obvious that it is in your interest, too. It's Adam Smith's much-maligned but no less active 'invisible hand'. Besides, think how Chinese companies can benefit while they have no reason to respect the intellectual property of the enemy.

Why I Stay in an Abusive Relationship with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

I did not so much enlist for Facebook as i was drafted. I knew about it for a while but ignored it. A lot of my friends had been on MySpace, and I had opened an account, but I found it all too ugly. Folks said that I could customize it anyway I wanted, but I just wasn't into having myself as a brand. My MySpace is probably out there on some 4-bit server, linked to a Hotmail account that I have long closed. Folks said I might like Facebook, and it did seem less hideous, but not anything  I wanted. Then a friend, who has himself left Facebook, made me an administrator of a group that organized neighborhood cookouts, so I felt obliged.

That was in the old days when one's status was a fill-in-the-blank. 'Dale "woke up to find a winter wonderland"' or such. I still drove a Nokia flip phone with no support of course for MMS, and I had a Dell Inspiron running Windows 57, the smallest I could find with a video drive. I was in the middle of a period of my life when mostly I was on vacation, paddling oceans and rivers and creeks and lakes. But when I found myself once more growing content with collecting books as well as having waves smack me in the face, I found Facebook growing  in content as well, adding paragraphs and photographs. Out on my bike or in my boat--my username in those days was paeddler--the usual thing to do when I met new people was to become 'friends' on Facebook. Most often that meant little more than receiving a reminder that someone was having a birthday and I could look at their profile and remember having had a beer with him once in Mount Vernon. But it also meant receiving friend invitations from people with whom I had had very important connections but with whom I had lost contact: college friends, high school friends; my first grade girl friend who now is married to someone named Tom with whom she raises horses in Texas; my freshman philosophy professor whom I had suspected to have been a CIA agent and who, when I asked him on Facebook Messenger whether that were true, neither affirmed nor denied it. 

Already some of my friends were criticizing Facebook.  Either some small changes had ruined it or the information about themselves which they had put on the internet, information now being called 'personal data', was available to be found on the internet, and that allowed them to receive advertisements related to things they had posted about themselves. None of that bothered me. I always took the position that if one were too unhappy about the appearance of Facebook, one could leave. I had read the small print and realized that there has been no privacy since women started gossiping over their clothes lines.  Facebook was basically a huge clothes line, but one that had huge electric bills that needed to be paid somehow.

There was also a thing I really liked about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg:  the concept of one identity. A lot of people were upset when aliasing became more difficult on Facebook. But I think the more honest we are about ourselves, the better it is for everyone. I semi-jokingly called this the Luke 12:3 effect.  So I try not to present a false depiction of myself on Facebook, although of course I probably don't really know myself well enough to present a completely truthful depiction.

However, as Dieter Boen, executive editor of The Verge, a part of Vox Media, a blatantly left-leaning bunch, says, 'here's the thing': Facebook is not one identity. Just last week Mark Zuckerberg stood center stage at D8 and talked about Facebook being a privacy company that was going to increase its support of groups of 'real friends'. Except for the privacy bit, which drew uncomfortable laughs from an audience who mainly drew their pay checks from Facebook, it sounded like the sort of neighborhood cook-out encourager that had drawn me in. And just last week Facebook banned some people from the community forever.

Whenever cracks had appeared in Facebook's one identity, I had tried to apologize for them. To use Bohn's phrase again (and in my own effort to have one identity I should admit that probably the main reason I keep The Verge at the top of my News Feed is that I think Dieter is seriously hot), 'here's the thing:' there has never been anything quite like Facebook before and there isn't an operating manual for such a thing. People complain about Facebook, but they still use it because it allows them to publish their thoughts in a way never before possible. With a $100 smartphone one can tell the world to stop, one wants to get off, or whatever else is one's status this fifteen minutes. And, Facebook has seemed most often to be the most open 'social medium', the one least quick to remove content because it 'violates community standards'. The photograph of Robert Lentz's icon,  'Lord of the Dance', was removed by Google+ as being pornographic, but it stayed on Facebook. It's hard to know what the standards are of a community of 2.23 billion people.

Unless, of course, those standards are required to be the standards of Marky Z & Company. As is  becoming increasingly clear, those standards are pretty vanilla shit-posting progressive. Now don't get me wrong. I have many vanilla shit-posting progressive friends, and they are nice people.  I just don't want them to be the arbiters of what may be said across the global clothes line, any more than I want the Donald to control what can be said. I would not even find it outside the rights of Facebook to censor people who seem to be to the right of their position if they admitted that they were a progressive social adjustment platform. Vox never claim to be unbiased. But Facebook do. They claim to be wanting to connect the whole world. Except for those they don't want to connect, those who belong, I suppose, in Mrs. Clinton's  basket of contemptibles.

The 2016 presidential election was an interesting event in the relatively young life of Facebook.  People used the platform to call each other all sorts of things. I was called all sorts of things because I not only did not find either party's candidate worthy of my vote nor did I think that the things said about them were necessarily true. Because I didn't think Mrs. Clinton actually ate sausage made of unborn children for breakfast, it was assumed that I was a socialist or in cahoots with Wall Street. (Actually, I abhor socialism and admire Wall Street, but that has nothing to do with my opinion of Mrs. Clinton.) Because I voted for Gary Johnson, it was assumed that I must have secretly supported Mr. Trump.

The real position of Facebook was revealed in an internal memo circulated just after the election, stating that they had failed in their mission, a memo issued just after Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had been sent to Purgatory for funding a billboard suggesting that Mrs. Clinton might be a bit greedy.

And now, Facebook has a black list of people whom they consider 'too dangerous' to be allowed to speak to the 2.23 billion folks on Facebook  Why do I think that Marky Z should change his grey t-shirt for a pink suit now that he's making the place nice?

And yet, despite my revulsion, I have not yet left Facebook. I am exploring other platforms, ones less likely to ban me forever if I make a slip in correctness. I am lucky it didn't happen already, because once I shared a comment Alex Jones had made about public education. At the time I had no idea who Alex Jones was, but I then and now found what he had said accurate. I am not one to indulge in ad hominem arguments.  I stay on Facebook because I think that in the long run, having 2.23 billion people in conversation is good thing, even if that conversation does become heated and insulting and silly,  and that the 2.23 billion people in the conversation are more important than Mark Zuckerberg.  I stay on Facebook because I think that both Mark Zuckerberg and Alex Jones are sincere in their positions, at least much of the time and insofar as they understand themselves, even if I think they are often acting from fear. But, here's the thing (two things, actually): first,what one fears one often comes to hate, and removing the face of what one fears from the book, one invites more hate; second, the one identity of a community of 2.23 billion people is very complex, and Facebook reminds me of that complexity every time I click on that blue icon, punching through my bubble.

One more thing, a confession of sorts from one who claims to value one identity, a concession to how complex and contradictory life in the Zuckerberg Galaxy can be: a friend on PornHub asked me if I were on Facebook, and I didn't tell him my real name. I remain on Facebook because so I am not ready to throw the first stone.

The Lure of the Past

Yesterday, Notre-Dame de Paris burned. Nine centuries ago, Notre-Dame de Paris was started. Already, the president of France has vowed to rebuild it, and promises of donations to reconstruct it are being spoke around the world. It's the French version of MAGA.

My thoughts on its reconstruction will of course not be on the list of considerations for its rebuilding, but I think to replicated it would be a mistake.  The cathedral was built with the best engineering knowledge of the middle ages, and it has stood as a symbol of church and state and culture, both loved and hated, ever since. Paris and France now have the opportunity both to honor the valuable remnants of the past and to build something symbolic of our time, keeping the west front and the sanctuary but building a nave and choir with modern methods and modern values, and almost certainly at a lower cost than replicating a relic. A museum could be built to give access to parts of the previous building to far more people than could see them scattered across the huge structure.

The lure of some past, golden age, is always with us, and is especially strong in times of great social and technological change.The gothic revival in the midst of the industrial revolution, which fueled Eugene Violet-le-Duc's nineteenth century restoration of the cathedral, was one example of that lure. I would suggest that such revivalist movements are mostly acts of fear in the face of the new. While Violet le-Duc was recreating a vision of France at  a time of ancient glory, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was building the Great Western Railway in Britain, creating a vision of Britain in a time of new glory.

France, along with the rest of us, is once again in a time of crisis, with people again in the streets, complaining ostensibly about taxes on fuel, but more importantly about the many and deeper discomforts with the seemingly chaotic changes of the contemporary culture. I would suggest that France, and the rest of us who are saying that this week we are Parisiennes, would be better served to find another Isambard Kingdom Brunel than  another Eugene Violet-le-Duc.

On thePlayground

As I write this, the kids are arguing about Special Investigator Mueller's report on whether Donald Trump or his gang colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election. The argument will certainly grow into a playground brawl, and would perhaps best be used as an X-Files mini-series. The Truth, we are told, is out there. (We just don't like it, so there must be a conspiracy.)

Trump is saying that he has been exonerated, an interesting choice of words for someone who, as Mueller has revealed, has run his campaign and his business surrounded by crooks and thugs who will keep a casting director busy for months when the movie, God Father IV and V and maybe VI, depending on how things play out between Donnie Jr. and Jared Kushner play out, is made.

But I view the findings not as an exoneration for Donald Trump, but as a failure. Collusion means playing together. Certainly Trump has wanted to play with Vladimir Putin, who is the best example of a right-Hegelian Romantic Great Man on the playground this decade. He is the sort of man that Donald Trump wants to be, with military parades and fanfares and people standing at attention. Certainly little Donnie wants to play with Vlad, to be his friend. (Little Donnie wants to be friends with all the best dictators, the biggest bullies and aspiring bullies, on the playground, including Rodrigo Duterte, Kim Jong-un, King Salman, Jair Bolsonaro, and Benjamin Netanyahu. (If he knew more about Nicolas Maduro, he would like him, too. Trump really should listen to more briefings from his staff, rather than going with his admittedly ample gut.)  Had Trump been president during the thirties, I suspect that he would be bragging about his close relationships with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin.

But, sadly for Trump, Putin will play him, as did Kim and Salman, but not play with him. Why would anyone want to be friends with anyone who so easily turns on his friends as Donald Trump has done? Besides, Trump is not interested in colluding with Russia. He knows, it seems, very little about Russia, except that it's big. Again, he avoids his advisers and briefings and goes with his gut, and in his gut he admires Putin. If Putin were the dictator of Mexico, Mexico would be great again in the gut of Trump.


Sadly for the rest of us, Trump is not the only one who is dazzled by the right-Hegelian Great Man whom Thomas Carlyle presented as the only possibility for our meagre lives to have meaning and excitement. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigned--and continue to campaign--as the only one who can save us from our situation, which they insist is a crisis. Hillary Clinton, too, wanted to be a Great Man, campaigning as our Champion like some Joan of Arc in tweed. Many people, it seems, are more willing to be told that they are living in a crisis which needs a great solution rather than to consider the situation in which they are living as something which can be understood and used for our great advantage.

Nor, sadly, is Donald Trump the first american president who wants to be a Great Man and to play with other Great Men. Franklin Roosevelt's special friendship with Uncle Joe cost the people of eastern Europe dearly, as could yet be the case were Trump to develop his friendship with Putin.

Fortunately for those of us who prefer not to go off to fight the wars of our Leader, who prefer to post photographs of our grandchildren and our pets on Facebook, a platform developed by men and women working to bring us together rather than to divide us, using smartphones made in China and dependent on international trade, Trump, too, will pass. Fortunately, he is a buffoon more than a Great Man. He must be taken seriously only because the voters of the United States have given him the keys to the White House for a while. But the voters of the United States are a fickle bunch, and the next president might not want to play the same game of bullies. Uncle Joe found Harry Truman much less obliging than he had found FDR. (No one else seems to have recognized the ephemeral nature of US leadership and used it to his advantage so well as Kim.)

I can't end my little post-script to the Mueller's tale without noting one other sad and fortunate situation in which this playground fight is taking place. Sadly, it is the increasingly obvious that the men and women behind the green curtain are making themselves irrelevant.  Given what seems to be immense power, the 'leaders' of the United States use it almost entirely to accuse each other of low crimes and misdemeanors rather than to guide the country through the biggest changes that have ever happened in human history. Fortunately, human intelligence is not confined to a central agency.

That grandeur of humanity, the creativity which has in times past been called the image of God, 'will flame out, like shining from shook foil;/It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil/Crushed.'

So, I say, let the Great Men (and Women) have their squabbles and parades and accusations. Don't blame me. I voted for Sergey Brin, a Russian. In fact, I wrote this essay on an app I bought from the Google Playstore.

Not for Orphans

There is a charming bit of Dorothy Parker lore in which Miss Parker, an orphan, is staying with friends who, as she is coming down the stairs to breakfast, are red in the face from a heated argument about whose mother is worse. Embarrassed to be seen so disturbed, they ask Miss Parker if it isn't too warm in the house. 'Not for orphans,' she replied. In the heated exchange about global warming, I feel a bit like an orphan. I am not particularly worried. Let me explain why.

First, let me say that I think 'climate change' is a better term than 'global warming'. Certainly the average temperatures are going up, but more days of higher temperatures with fewer days of lower temperatures will drive up the average. But if the warming were even around the globe, there would probably be fewer big storms generated. Some of the biggest events of climate change which we have already seen may be an increase in big hurricanes.

My first reason not to be worried is not a very valid one, but it still influences my perspective. I am seventy-two years old and I have lived through several potential world-ending crises that have come and gone. There was the cloud of impending nuclear war, with duck and cover drills at school and the movie 'On the Beach' to scare us. Then came overpopulation. The depletion of the ozone layer was in there somewhere. Acid rain was going to turn us all to grey goo. I can understand why younger people are rather worried. Climate change is their duck and cover moment.

But, one might say, climate chance is different. It isn't like any of those other things. No, it isn't. Nor do I deny it. The earth has been warming for the past 12,000 years. I am sitting on a hill side in Northwest Washington that was under a deep cover of ice not that long ago in terms of the age of the earth. The curve seems to be rising more steeply lately, and in the time period during which humans have been letting a lot of carbon dioxide (and other gases) loose into the atmosphere. It is always sketchy scientific methodology to assume correspondence to causation, but of course 'most competent scientists' agree that it is human activity which is the cause. I am skeptical of science by democracy. If it had been left to 'most competent' scientists, we might never have heard of Albert Einstein's equations which explain almost everything that we can observe happening in the universe. But even then there is that pesky 'almost everything'.

The earth's climate is a very complex system. Even fairly regional weather patterns are very complex systems. Ask John von Neumann, who supported the development of early computers in order to make better weather reports available to the allied air forces that were bombing Germany. Eighty years later, with much better data reporting and much more powerful computers, the forecast for rain on my little hill has dropped in the last three hours from 62% to 34%, and I won't really know if it rains tomorrow until tomorrow happens.  For all I know there is some sort of synergistic force in the world's climatic system which will either stop the warming trend or ignore any of our efforts to curb it. (The other great impetus for modern computers, led by John Maunchly among several competitors, was to compute firing tables for artillery. Although Maunchly's Eniac wasn't completed until after the end of World War II, it was more successful at projectories than weather.)

Assuming that it is human activity which has caused the spike in rising temperatures, then it is almost certainly too late for us to do anything much about it. Instead of preparing for the results of the climate change we are wring our hands about, we run around blaming other people and proposing draconic governmental programs. The panic-propelled programs might not do much to stop climate change, but one may be sure that their draconic powers would not be given up.

Many people panicked about climate change act as if the idea that changing the ratio of gases in the atmosphere might have some sort of effect on their lives was hidden from them by the companies that came to their doors in the night and forced them to buy cars and fly to exotic locations to have fun. They had never thought about the fact that one way of committing suicide is to sit in a car with the motor running in a garage, nor that one might think of the earth as a garage in which we all live, in which we all share each other's exhaust.

Now, however, climate change has been presented as a crisis, and something must be done. Not of course done by me, but forced upon everyone by some wonderful bureaucracy.

I don't think most people are as concerned about what they are calling the crisis of climate change as they are about proclaiming other people guilty. I bases this notion on the evidence that my friends who claim to be terrified by climate change are most often the same ones who send me photos of their skiing trips in the Swiss Alps or their new electric cars. How cute. The fuel that powers your Tesla is burned in somebody else's back yard, and transported over great distances to your green power outlet.

So: I would not be at all surprised if in the next few years the climate changes dramatically. Species will become extinct, just as they have for as long as there have been species. People will have to migrate to new homes, as people have done since Lucy's kids left their African Eden. Miami may be flooded. I don't think anyone has claimed that the civilization of Miami surpasses that of Atlantis, also said to have flooded. But humanity may survive. The destruction will perhaps not be greater than that occurring to Berlin or Coventry or Tokyo in World War II. There will perhaps not be more refugees than following that war. Perhaps the death total will be no higher than it was in World War I, although since the population of the earth is about seven times what it was at the start of World War I, a smaller percentage of fatalities would still be a large number.

The inconvenient truth is, I don't think people really care much about human or other deaths. I have already suggested my evidence: the great popularity of wars, and not just wars among 'savages', who certainly fought ads savagely as they could with their limited technologies, but among the world's most civilized people. We seem to have much more concern to blame other people for our problems, to expect other people to solve them, and to escape the consequences ourselves. (Clue the substitutionary atonement meme.)

The pleasant truth is that there are some men who do solve problems, often accidentally, it is true, and therefore the very real possibility that we will be able either to temper climate change or life with it and prosper.

The stark truth is, the universe will continue. I suspect that the world will continue with humans, and with the next evolutionary creatures that already seem to be making their appearance on the darwinian/de chardinian stage, which we call AI. Little sea creatures will survive that will feed on the rich molecules of what we, from our aesthetic position, call plastic waste. Bigger creatures will eat them. It will soon be turtles all the way up again. Then we will probably drink again the fruit of our vine, and lie naked in our tents. Then we will be around to see the next rough beast that slouches towards our new Babylon, our new Atlantis. Or we may not be around. The AI may have inherited the earth, a species sui generis, a species of new orphans.